A survey aimed to better understand the access needs, adaptations, and caregiving responsibilities across our community, whether you're disabled, a caregiver, or someone who simply uses tools to make work easier.
Current version is a Google Forms survey. Please feel free to fill it out, whether or not you have access needs.
Accesscats, an accessibility-focused group at GitHub, developed an internal survey to better understand how employees actually work, including the assistive technologies, adaptations, and caregiving responsibilities that shape their day-to-day experience. Initial results suggest that accessibility-related tools and strategies are far more widespread than commonly assumed. This project aims to evolve the survey into a more rigorous, externally usable instrument that can capture a broader range of developer experiences across different work environments, with the goal of informing more effective assistive technologies and accessibility practices across the industry.
- Prioritize psychological safety and anonymity for respondents
- Focus on lived experience over labels or diagnoses
- Keep language inclusive and broadly applicable
- Capture impact on work, not just presence of need
- Minimize intrusion while maximizing actionable insight
Participants will help evolve an existing survey into a more rigorous, externally usable tool for measuring employee accessibility, assistive technology usage, and caregiving impact. Experience in accessibility, assistive technology, survey design, or developer experience is helpful but not required.
How to get started:
- (Optional, ~5–10 min) Take the demo survey: https://forms.gle/QLzVCmtAx9vwCsFM8
- Review the survey questions and note anything unclear, biased, or missing
- Share suggestions via discussion post or join in on the discourse
Ways to contribute:
- Improve question clarity and remove ambiguity or leading language
- Help generalize wording for different work environments (remote, hybrid, in-office)
- Strengthen how we emphasize safety and privacy to respondents
- Refine how we measure impact on participation, productivity, and opportunity
- Advise on survey design best practices for external publication
If you have a background in research, statistics, or survey design (e.g., PhD, academic, or industry research experience), we would especially value your input on question validity, bias reduction, and overall experimental rigor.
This questionnaire is open source under the MIT License. You are welcome to use, adapt, and share it. Attribution appreciated but not required.